CHRISTIANITY. Christianity claims to be based upon the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth (b. shortly before the year 1 of our era), who seems to have come to regard himself as the Messiah (Christ) eagerly expected by the Jews, while interpreting the Messiahship in a new way. To Jesus the Kingdom of God meant a divine rule under the guidance of a spiritual Messiah, not in a national and political realm, but in the hearts and minds of men. The Kingdom was in the world, but not of the world. In the world in a real sense: not of the world in being raised above the world. Jesus was not the first to speak of God as a Father. But here again he brought a new interpretation. The sense in which he uses Father is not that of the stern (if just) master and ruler of the household, but that of the loving head and friend of the family. God as the Father Is just but not stern, re morseful but not revengeful, reproachful but not vindic tive. Full of kindness and love, on the first sign of penitence, he is ever ready to forgive. All are the child ren of God. Consequently all are brothers and sisters, who, being equally loved, should love one another equally. " Jesus had realized the life of God in the soul of man and the life of man in the love of God. That was the real secret of his life, the well-spring of his purity, his compassion, his unwearied courage, his unquenchable idealism : he knew the Father. But if he had that greatest of all possessions. the real key to the secret of life. it was his highest social duty to share it and help others to gain what he had. He had to teach men to live as children in the presence of their Father, and no longer as slaves cringing before a despot. He had to show them that the ordinary life of selfish ness and hate and anxiety and chafing ambition and covetousness is no life at all, and that they must enter into a new world of love and solidarity and inward contentment " (W. Rausehenbush, Christianity and the Social Crisis, 1907). The kernel of Jesus' message or Gospel (evangelism) was not so much the preaching of the coming of the kingdom of God as this doctrine of the fatherhood of God. The model prayer which he gave to his disciples, and which even to-day is the real con fession of faith that unites all Christendom (Arno Neu mann, Jesus, 19(16) begins with the words " Our Father." In his determination to carry out the will of the Father. be rejected the ordinances of the orthodox leaders of the people, and elected to pay the penalty of dath upon the cross. He was the Redeemer, though " not in the sense that his death was a propitiatory sacrifice, without which the God of love would not have been able to forgive us our sins." It was " his special work to redeem by guiding us from the letter to the spirit, from the feeling of a slave to the love of a child, from self seeking to brotherly love, from the dominion of the visible to that of the invisible, and his death showed that he was ready and determined to offer, in order to procure these benefits, not his labour only, but also his life " (Neumann). He was the Saviour and Deliverer. " Jesus delivered religion from all national claims, from all national fetters, from ceremonial, from the letter of the law, and from the domination of erudition " (W. Bousset). The religion of Jesus was simple. In order to adapt it to the Graeco-Roman world, the Apostle Paul to some extent elaborated and transformed it. A com munity of disciples became a Church. The divine aspect of Christ was emphasized. Jesus became a Redeemer sent from heaven to deliver mankind from sin and death, and his death a vicarious sacrifice of atonement. The sacred acts of Christianity—such as Baptism and the Lord's Supper—began to receive a sacramental in terpretation. Whether, and to what extent Jesus him self was a mystic is an open question. But in any case Paul and John (or the Johannine writers) found mys ticism in the Gospel and developed the teaching along these lines. According to Evelyn Underhill (ALM), Paul is in fact " the supreme example of the Christian mystic: of a " change of mind " resulting in an enor mous dower of vitality : of a career of impassioned activity, of " divine fecundity " second only to that of Jesus Himself. In him, the new life breaks out, shows itself in its dual aspect; the deep consciousness of Spiritual Reality which is characteristic of the contem plative nature, supporting a practical genius for concrete things." When the Gospel of John was written (c. 100 A.D.), the Gnostic heresy, which was beginning to ger minate in the time of Paul, had made considerable progress. The writer therefore opposes to it the true Christian gnosis. To the Jobannine writers we owe the exposition of God as Spirit (John iv. 24), Light (I. John i. 5), Love (I. John iv. S, 16). In the Apostolic Age Churches began to be organised on very much the same lines as Jewish Synagogues. There was of course a Christian community at Rome in the days of Paul, to which he addressed his Epistle to the Romans. It has been conjectured that this was founded by the Apostle Peter. At any rate, Peter, to whom (according to Matthew xvi. 18-19) the keys of the kingdom of heaven were committed, is re garded by Roman Catholics as its chief foundation, and the Pope as his successor is held to be " the vicar of Christ, the visible head of the Church, the doctor and teacher of all the faithful " (Cath. Diet.). In the second century the powerful appeal made by various types of Gnosticism led to the development in Christianity of its episcopal form of government and of a tendency to rely upon written creeds. The latter tendency was accentu ated by the menace of a new heresy, that of Arius, who began to teach in Alexandria about 318 A.D. At the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. the so-called Nicene Creed was formulated. At the First Council of Constantinople in 351 A.D. it was reaffirmed and slightly supplemented. In the next century a great controversy arose between two schools of Christian thought—the school of Antioch and the school of Alexandria—which had developed during the third century about the two natures in Christ. In 451 A.D. the Council of Chalcedon sought to settle the matter, but neither of the extremes was satisfied. " The Monophysites, who believed in one nature, separated from the church. These form the Egyptian (or Coptic), the Abyssinian, and the Armenian churches to the present time. The radical Dyophysites, who be lieved in two natures, also separated and formed what is known as the Nestorian church. For some centuries they flourished, spreading eastward to Turkestan and China, but have now dwindled to a small remnant in Persia " (G. A. Barton. Rel.). The division of the early Church into the Eastern Church and the Western Church began when the Roman Empire was divided into an Eastern and a Western empire, and was completed in the Middle Ages. A marked difference between the two was that the Eastern Church was given to speculation and definition, while the Western Church concerned itself more with organization and administration. Monasticism took root and flourished in the East and West alike, but it assumed a rather different role. " In the East monasticism preserved its ascetic, quietistic character, but in the more vigorous West it developed into a civilising power of the highest importance" (Bousset). Bousset describes Christianity in the Eastern Church—the Greek Catholic Church—as sinking on the whole to a lower stage of religious life, through its attachment to fixed dogmas and self-sufficing acts and ceremonies. " Religion became entirely custom, usage as it had been when it was at the national stage of religious life; and from the time when the Byzantine Empire was subdued by advancing Islam the Oriental Church was split up into a number of Insignificant, de generate Churches closely united to the smaller Christian nations which were now arising in the East." In the West, on the other hand, the Roman Catholic Church did not lose its spiritual generating power. It developed the old traditional ecclesiastical features, drew to itself the spirit of Roman law and Roman world-empire, and assumed a political character. Its development owed much to the genius of St. Augustine and later of St.
Francis of Assisi. The Middle Ages, after a period of darkness, produced a series of intellectual leaders who are known as the Schoolmen, such as Anselm (10384109 A.D.), Abelard, and Thomas Aquineas (1227-74). These expounded the doctrines of the Church (e.g., the Atone ment) in such ways as to commend them to the reason. Then other divines, seeking more direct knowledge of God and the Bible, interested themselves in a presenta tion of the Scriptures in the vernacular, and in mys ticism. In the 14th century appeared the translation of the Bible by Wycliffe (1324-84) and the writings of Meister Heinrich Eckhart (d. 1329), John Ruysbroek (1293-1381), and John Tauler (1300-1361). On the one hand, it was felt that with the Holy Scriptures to guide him the meanest peasant might know the truth; and, on the other band, that " the soul finds God in its own depths" (Ruysbroek). In the fifteenth century mys ticism in a developed form passed into common life. " It was a mysticism which abandoned speculation for practice. Its keynote was the positive imitation ' of Christ, and the reality of inward religion " (H. B. Workman). The outcome of this new movement on its intellectual side is seen in the Imitation of Christ of Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471), which Dr. Workman de scribes as " the most influential mystic writing the world has ever known." If the Protestant Reformation was not the result of the work of such men as Wycliffe, Huss (d. as a martyr in 1415), and Eckhart, they as sisted humanists like Erasmus to prepare the way for it. The Reformation itself, as A. C. M'Giffert points out, was not exclusively nor even chiefly a religious movement. " It involved a break with the historical ecclesiastical institution and the organisation of new churches independent of Rome, but the break itself was as much political as religious both in its causes and in its results. Dissatisfaction with the existing order of things was widespread in Western Europe, and was coming to ever more active expression. It was not con fined to one class of society, nor limited to one set of conditions. The period was marked by discontent and unrest, moral, religious, social, economical, and political. The conviction was growing that traditional customs and institutions needed adjustment to the new needs of a new age, and on every hand criticisms of the old were rife and programmes of reform were multiplying. For centuries the Church had been the most imposing in stitution in Europe, and the most Influential factor in its life. Rightly or wrongly it was widely held re sponsible for current evils in every line, and every project for the betterment of society concerned itself in one or another way with the ecclesiastical establish ment." The Reformation is closely associated with the name of Martin Luther (1433-1546), in whose teaching the most modern element was the idea of Christian liberty. He laid great stress on the doctrine of just ification by faith. Another of the fathers of Protest antism was the great Swiss reformer, Huldreich Zwingli (1484-1531), though the differences between him and Luther were considerable. In his teaching the con trolling place in Christian thought was given not to a personal religious experience, but to the absolute and unconditioned will of God. It was he rather than Luther that guided the reformed wing of Protestantism. The task of formulating and systematizing the teachings of Luther and Zwingli was undertaken chiefly by Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560) in the Lutheran camp, and by John Calvin (1509-64) in the Reformed. There was much in common between Melanchthon and Zwingli. " Both had the same conception of the authority of the Bible, of the relation of natural and revealed theology, of the oneness of law and gospel, and of the nature of faith " (M'Giffert). The theology of Calvin, however, who re garded man as a totally depraved being, and taught that his sins were borne vicariously by Christ, was the most widely accepted. The sixteenth century gave birth to many radical sects, which were not all the fruit of the Protestant Reformation. These included the Ana baptists and the Socinians. In England the break with Rome came in the reign of Henry VIII. In the reign of Edward VI. by the first Act of Uniformity (1549) the Book of Common Prayer was made the only lawful service hook in the English Church. The second Act of Uniformity (1552) substituted a revised edition. In the reign of Elizabeth certain reformers who were called Puritans came into prominence. Many of the Puritans aimed simply at purifying and reforming the English Church from within. But some of them refused to be long to a national church, and formed independent churches of their own (e.g., the Independents or Con gregationalists). Thus arose the Separatists or Noncon formists. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through the influence especially of Philip Jacob Spener (representative of Pietism) in Germany, and of George Fox (d. 1690, representing the Friends) and John Wesley (representative of Evangelicalism) in England, mystical piety again asserted itself. Wesley, who came under the influence of the Moravians. and with whom was associated George Whitefield, sought to promote an evangelical revival in the Church, and ended by found ing (1739) a new denomination (Methodism). In America a movement closely related to the evangelicalism of Wesley appeared in the New England theology of Jona than Edwards and his school. At the same time the philosophical speculations of men like Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes and Locke, and the scientific discoveries of men like Bruno, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Gassendi, Bacon and Newton promoted rationalism in all spheres of thought. In England theology sought refuge to some extent in the Neo-Platonism of the Cambridge school, as represented by such men as Benjamin Wbichcote, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and John Smith (Cam bridge Platonists), who laid " emphasis upon reason as a faculty by which we may enjoy a direct vision of spiritual realities bidden from the senses and inaccess ible by the ordinary processes of discursive reason " (M'Giffert); but to a greater extent in the rational super naturalism of theologians like John Tillotson and Samuel Clarke. The Deists (such as Tindal, Chubb, and Mor gan) held that religion is primarily a means to virtue, and even opposed the divine claims of Christianity; but some of them at least regarded themselves as defenders of the true faith. In France Deism found wide accept ance, and in the writings of Voltaire and Rousseau was developed on more radical lines. In Germany rationalism in religion was promoted by the philosophy of Leibnitz and Kant. In America by the early Unitarians. In the nineteenth century a profound impression was made upon Christian thought by the philosophy of Kant and Hegel, by the development of historical and literary criticism of the Old and New Testaments, by the spread of various types of Socialism (the Chartist Movement, etc.), and by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). Christianity struggled to readjust itself, either by abandoning non-essentials (the Broad Church Movement in the Church of England; Modernism in the Church of Rome; various types of New Theology in the Free Churches), or by going back to traditions of Authority (proclamation of Papal Infallibility, 1S70: the Oxford or Tractarian Movement in the Church of Eng land). Turning to more recent times, the Roman Church seems to have taken its stand definitely for the mediaeval form of Christianity. In Protestantism modern Chris tian thought " is still endeavouring to adjust itself to the new intellectual universe called into being by modern science. The adjustment is not fully accomplished and there is consequently, much variety " (G. A. Barton). But the tendency seems to be to lay increasing stress upon a Christian life rather than upon Christian dogmas; and to regard religion as a system of living emotions rather than of dead intellectual errors. Mys ticism, if of a rather new kind, is again making a strong and successful appeal (see Jane E. Harrison, Rationalism and Religious Reaction, 1919).